Opinion Blog

Disappointment about the true Wendy Davis story

In this Thursday, July 25, 2013 file photo, Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis, famous for her 12-hour filibuster attempt against an anti-abortion rights bill, speaks at a fundraiser in Washington. Unforced errors by GOP front-runners to replace Gov. Rick Perry, when he steps aside in 2014 have given Texas Democrats, a little hope in winning a statewide office for the first time in 20 years. But as they wait for Davis’ expected Oct. 3 announcement that she will run, they’re left without a candidate to pounce on their rivals’ missteps.

I read Dallas Morning News staff writer Wayne Slater’s set-the-record-straight story about Wendy Davis on Sunday after taking a big gulp. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the truth, or how badly she and her aides had screwed up the truth. Like lots of readers, I wanted to know that Texas finally had a viable Democratic candidate so that this would truly be a contest. I didn’t want Greg Abbott (or whoever the Republicans ultimately choose) to win just because he’s a Republican.

Going into this race, Davis’s campaign certainly knew that the Republicans were going to investigate the hell out of her. They would try to turn up every piece of dirt they could. They would pick apart her story for inconsistencies or outright lies. A smart candidate would have done everything to get ahead of the Republicans. She would have recognized early on that, somehow, some wrong information had been released to the public. A smart candidate would have set the record straight long before journalists or politicians had a chance to turn it into something nasty.

Davis missed her chance, and now the Republicans are having a field day with it. As they should. This is Texas politics, not a ping pong match.

I’m not so concerned about the inconsistency of the timing of Davis’s first divorce. Whether she was 19 or 21 doesn’t really matter a whole lot, although I guess it’s nice to be able to claim she was a single teen mother struggling to get by, etc. Yes, it would have been nice for her to have stayed in a trailer park longer than three months, just to drive home to voters the true depth of her struggle. But it is what it is, a short stay in a trailer park. Still, no one can discount the hardest part — that she was a single mother, trying desperately to do right by her young daughter while making a living and trying to get an education, first at TCU and later at Harvard.

But that’s where the story gets murky and troublesome. Davis remarried and had another child. She got herself into Harvard Law School, which is a major accomplishment all by itself. Her husband, Jeffry Davis, took out a loan, footed the bill and agreed to take care of the two daughters while Wendy went off to Cambridge, Mass., to earn her law degree. Something happened while she was up there. The couple apparently drifted apart, as can happen when two people are separated for such a long period. There are hints of infidelity.

Uh-oh, suddenly, this isn’t turning into the kind of story we want to tell our children. It gets worse. Whatever happened between the two, Wendy wound up sacrificing custody of her youngest daughter, while the older one, now a young adult, chose to remain with Jeff Davis instead of moving in with Wendy. That’s a really big deal. All of a sudden, the image of a struggling mom working her way through law school disintegrates, and the image left is hardly the one we were led to believe. Even worse, Wendy Davis filed for divorce right after her husband paid the final bill for her law degree.

Maybe the true story was so horrendous that Wendy Davis sought deliberately to keep it from public view. Maybe she feared that if she started correcting the skewed public perception of her background, it would open a can of worms.

Whatever her rationale, it was wrong. Texans can forgive all of the above. But we cannot embrace someone who is deliberately deceptive. Transparency is a hallmark of a great politician. The second they start down that road of deception and betrayal of their supporters — Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, to name a few — the snowball effect gets harder and harder to stop.

That’s the true danger behind the Wendy Davis story. She’s got some major damage control ahead of her, and she’s going to have to brace for a relentless Republican campaign that will milk this for all it’s worth. By holding back the truth, she gave them far more ammunition than they ever should have received.

This story won’t make or break my decision on whether to vote for her or not. I’ll wait to read her answers to our online questionnaire and how she does in our interview. I want to know where she stands politically much more than I need to know the tawdry details of her life early in her career. But I do need reassurance that the words coming from her mouth match what she would actually do in office. In other words, I need to believe her. That’s where Slater’s story will make a difference.

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The Dallas Morning News Editorial Board was the first editorial board in the nation to use a blog to openly discuss hot topics and issues among its members and with readers. Our intent is to pull back the curtain on the daily process of producing the unsigned editorials that reflect the opinion of the newspaper, and to share analysis and opinion on issues of interest to board members and invited guest bloggers.